MNCM News

"The two words ‘information’ and ‘communication’ are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through." -- Sydney J. Harris

MNCM’s Measurement and Reporting Committee recently approved the transition from EuroQol’s EQ5D to the PROMIS Global Health – 10 tool to assess health-related quality of life for the Total Knee Replacement and Spinal Surgery measures. This transition will occur for patients with procedure dates beginning on January 1, 2015.

The EuroQol EQ5D patient-reported outcome tool was identified and approved for use in the measures in 2010. It was widely used in research and was the best tool available at the time for measuring and reporting quality of life changes. However, in 2012, EuroQol, the developer and copyright holder of the tool, announced new, prohibitive guidelines for the use of its EQ5D tool. These made it impractical for most Minnesota medical groups to continue use of the tool. Collaborating on potential solutions, both the total knee replacement and lumbar spine surgery workgroups independently chose the PROMIS Global Health-10, a 10-question survey that is completed by patients to evaluate their overall health-require quality of life. The PROMIS Global Health-10 is available for groups to download from the MNCM Data Portal under the Resources tab for each measure set.

Patients undergoing total knee replacement and spinal surgery are asked to complete the survey before and after their surgery; the change in their health-related quality of life is one of the performance measures for each procedure.

A communication was sent to orthopedic and neurosurgical practices in June alerting them to this likely transition to give practices as much time as possible to adjust their processes and electronic health record systems.

Conversion is possible for patients who completed the EQ5D tool before surgery and the PROMIS tool after surgery. Conversion will occur in the MNCM Data Portal.

For more details, please consult the draft Data Submission Guides for either measure which can be found in the MNCM Data Portal or contact us at support@mncm.org.

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